One Hundred Years of Solitude

ame house behind the church where you sent the letter."

"I'll be glad to, Jose Raquel," Colonel Aureliano Buendia said.

When he went out into the blue air of the mist his face grew damp as on some other dawn in the past and only then did he realize that he had ordered the sentence to be carried out in the courtyard and not at the cemetery wall. The firing squad, drawn up opposite the door, paid him the honors of a head of state.

"They can bring him out now," he ordered.





COLONEL GERINELDO MARQUEZ was the first to perceive the emptiness of the war. In his position as civil and military leader of Macondo he would have telegraphic conversations twice a week with Colonel Aureliano Buendia. At first those exchanges would determine the course of a flesh-and-blood war, the perfectly defined outlines of which told them at any moment the exact spot where it was and the prediction of its future direction. Although he never let himself be pulled into the area of confidences, not even by his closest friends, Colonel Aureliano Buendia still had at that time the familiar tone that made it possible to identify him at the other end of the wire. Many times he would prolong the talks beyond the expected limit and let them drift into comments of a domestic nature. Little by little, however, and as the war became more intense and widespread, his image was fading away into a universe of unreality. The characteristics of his speech were more and more uncertain, and they came together and combined to form words that were gradually losing all meaning. Colonel Gerineldo Marquez limited himself then to just listening, burdened by the impression that he was in telegraphic contact with a stranger from another world.

"I understand, Aureliano," he would conclude on the key. "Long live the Liberal party!"

He finally lost all contact with the war. What in other times had been a real activity, an irresistible passion of his youth, became a remote point of reference for him: an emptiness. His only refuge was Amaranta's sewing room. He would visit her every afternoon. He liked to watch her hands as she curled frothy petticoat cloth in the machine that was kept in motion by Remedios the Beauty. They spent many hours without speaking, content with their reciprocal company, but while Amaranta was inwardly pleased in keeping the fire of his devotion alive, he was unaware of the secret designs of that indecipherable heart. When the news of his return reached her, Amaranta had been smothered by anxiety. But when she saw him enter the house in the middle of Colonel Aureliano Buendia's noisy escort and she saw how he had been mistreated by the rigors of exile, made old by age and oblivion, dirty with sweat and dust, smelling like a herd, ugly, with his left arm in a sling, she felt faint with disillusionment. "My God," she thought. "This wasn't the person I was waiting for." On the following day, however, he came back to the house shaved and clean, with his mustache perfumed with lavender water and without the bloody sling. He brought her a prayerbook bound in mother-of-pearl.

"How strange men are," she said, because she could not think of anything else to say. "They spend their lives fighting against priests and then give prayerbooks as gifts."

From that time on, even during the most critical days of the war, he visited her every afternoon. Many times, when Remedios the Beauty was not present, it was he who turned the wheel on the sewing machine. Amaranta felt upset by the perseverance, the loyalty, the submissiveness of that man who was invested with so much authority and who nevertheless took off his sidearms in the living room so that he could go into the sewing room without weapons. But for four years he kept repeating his love and she would always find a way to reject him without hurting him, for even though she had not succeeded in loving him she could no longer live without him. Remedios the Beauty, who seemed indifferent to everything and who was thought to be mentally retarded, was not insensitive to so much devotion and she intervened in Colonel Gerineldo Marquez's favor. Amaranta suddenly discovered that the girl she had raised, who was just entering adolescence, was already the most beautiful creature that had even been seen in Macondo. She felt reborn in her heart the rancor that she had felt in other days for Rebeca, and begging God not to impel her into the extreme state of wishing her dead, she banished her from the sewing room. It was around that time that Colonel Gerineldo Marquez began to feel the boredom of the war. He summoned his reserves of persuasion, his broad and repressed tenderness, ready to give up for Amaranta a glory that had cost him the sacrifice of his best years. But he could not succeed in convincing her. One August afternoon, overcome by the unbearable weight of her own obstinacy, Amaranta locked herself in her bedroom to weep over her solitude unto death after giving her final answer to her tenacious suitor:

"Let's forget about each other forever," she told him. "We're too old for this sort of thing now."

Colonel Gerineldo Marquez had a telegraphic call from Colonel Aureliano Buendia that afternoon. It was a routine conversation which was not going to bring about any break in the stagnant war. At the end, Colonel Gerineldo Marquez looked at the desolate streets, the crystal water on the almond trees, and he found himself lost in solitude.

"Aureliano," he said sadly on the key, "it's raining in Macondo."

There was a long silence on the line. Suddenly the apparatus jumped with the pitiless letters from Colonel Aureliano Buendia.

"Don't be a jackass, Gerineldo," the signals said. "It's natural for it to be raining in August."

They had not seen each other for such a long time that Colonel Gerineldo Marquez was upset by the aggressiveness of the reaction. Two months later, however, when Colonel Aureliano Buendia returned to Macondo, his upset was changed to stupefaction. Even Ursula was surprised at how much he had changed. He came with no noise, no escort, wrapped in a cloak in spite of the heat, and with three mistresses, whom he installed in the same house, where he spent most of his time lying in a hammock. He scarcely read the telegraphic dispatches that reported routine operations. On one occasion Colonel Gerineldo Marquez asked him for instructions for the evacuation of a spot on the border where there was a danger that the conflict would become an international affair.

"Don't bother me with trifles," he ordered him. "Consult Divine Providence."

It was perhaps the most critical moment of the war. The Liberal landowners, who had supported the revolution in the beginning, had made secret alliances with the Conservative landowners in order to stop the revision of property titles. The politicians who supplied funds for the war from exile had publicly repudiated the drastic aims of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, but even that withdrawal of authorization did not seem to bother him. He had not returned to reading his poetry, which filled more than five volumes and lay forgotten at the bottom of his trunk. At night or at siesta time he would call one of his women to his hammock and obtain a rudimentary satisfaction from her, and then he would sleep like a stone that was not concerned by the slightest indication of worry. Only he knew at that time that his confused heart was condemned to uncertainty forever. At first, intoxicated by the glory of his return, by his remarkable victories, he had peeped into the abyss of greatness. He took pleasure in keeping by his right hand the Duke of Marlborough, his great teacher in the art of war, whose attire of skins and tiger claws aroused the respect of adults and the awe of children. It was then that he decided that no human being, not even Ursula, could come closer to him than ten feet. In the center of the chalk circle that his aides would draw wherever he stopped, and which only he could enter, he would decide with brief orders that had no appeal the fate of the world. The first time that he was in Manaure after the shooting of General Moncada, he hastened to fulfill his victim's last wish and the widow took the glasses, the medal, the watch, and the ring, but she would not let him in the door.

"You can't come in, colonel," she told him. "You may be in command of your war, but I'm in command of my house."

Colonel Aureliano Buendia did not show any sign of anger, but his spirit only calmed down when his bodyguard had sacked the widow's house and reduced it to ashes. "Watch out for your heart, Aureliano," Colonel Gerineldo Marquez would say to him then. "You're rotting alive." About that time he called together a second assembly of the principal rebel commanders. He found all types: idealists, ambitious people, adventurers, those with social resentments, even common criminals. There was even a former Conservative functionary who had taken refuge in the revolt to escape a judgment for misappropriation of funds. Many of them did not even know why they were fighting. In the midst of that motley crowd, whose differences of values were on the verge of causing an internal explosion, one gloomy authority stood out: General Teofilo Vargas. He was a full-blooded Indian, untamed, illiterate, and endowed with quiet wiles and a messianic vocation that aroused a demented fanaticism in his men. Colonel Aureliano Buendia called the meeting with the aim of unifying the rebel command against the maneuvers of the politicians. General Teofilo Vargas came forward with his intentions: in a few hours he shattered the coalition of better-qualified commanders and took charge of the main command. "He's a wild beast worth watching," Colonel Aureliano Buendia told his officers. "That man is more dangerous to us than the Minister of War." Then a very young captain who had always been outstanding for his timidity raised a cautious index finger.

"It's quite simple, colonel," he proposed. "He has to be killed."

Colonel Aureliano Buendia was not alarmed by the coldness of the proposition but by the way in which, by a fraction of a second, it had anticipated his own thoughts.

"Don't expect me to give an order like that," he said.

He did not give it, as a matter of fact. But two weeks later General Teofilo Vargas was cut to bits by machetes in an ambush and Colonel Aureliano Buendia assumed the main command. The same night that his authority was recognized by all the rebel commands, he woke up in a fright, calling for a blanket. An inner coldness which shattered his bones and tortured him even in the heat of the sun would not let him sleep for several months, until it became a habit. The intoxication of power began to break apart under waves of discomfort. Searching for a cure against the chill, he had the young officer who had proposed the murder of General Teofilo Vargas shot. His orders were being carried out even before they were given, even before he thought of them, and they always went much beyond what he would have dared have them do. Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction. He was bothered by the people who cheered him in neighboring villages, and he imagined that they were the same cheers they gave the enemy. Everywhere he met adolescents who looked at him with his own eyes, who spoke to him with his own voice, who greeted him with the same mistrust with which he greeted them, and who said they were his sons. He felt scattered about, multiplied, and more solitary than ever. He was convinced that his own officers were lying to him. He fought with the Duke of Marlborough. "The best friend a person has," he would say at that time, "is one who has just died." He was weary of the uncertainty, of the vicious circle of that eternal war that always found him in the same place, but always older, wearier, even more in the position of not knowing why, or how, or even when. There was always someone outside of the chalk circle. Someone who needed money, someone who had a son with whooping cough, or someone who wanted to go off and sleep forever because he could not stand the shit taste of the war in his mouth and who, nevertheless, stood at attention to inform him: "Everything normal, colonel." And normality was precisely the most fearful part of that infinite war: nothing ever happened. Alone, abandoned by his premonitions, fleeing the chill that was to accompany him until death, he sought a last refuge in Macondo in the warmth of his oldest memories. His indolence was so serious that when they announced the arrival of a commission from his party that was authorized to discuss the stalemate of the war, he rolled over in his hammock without completely waking up.

"Take them to the whores," he said.

They were six lawyers in frock coats and top hats who endured the violent November sun with stiff stoicism. Ursula put them up in her house. They spent the greater part of the day closeted in the bedroom in hermetic conferences and at dusk they asked for an escort and some accordion players and took over Catarino's store. "Leave them alone," Colonel Aureliano Buendia ordered. "After all, I know what they want." At the beginning of December the long-awaited interview, which many had foreseen as an interminable argument, was resolved in less than an hour.

In the hot parlor, beside the specter of the pianola shrouded in a white sheet, Colonel Aureliano Buendia did not sit down that time inside the chalk circle that his aides had drawn. He sat in a chair between his political advisers and, wrapped in his woolen blanket, he listened in silence to the brief proposals of the emissaries. They asked first that he renounce the revision of property titles in order to get back the support of the Liberal landowners. They asked, secondly, that he renounce the fight against clerical influence in order to obtain the support of the Catholic masses. They asked, finally, that he renounce the aim of equal rights for natural and illegitimate children in order to preserve the integrity of the home.

"That means," Colonel Aureliano Buendia said, smiling when the reading was over, "that all we're fighting for is power."

"They're tactical changes," one of the delegates replied. "Right now the main thing is to broaden the popular base of the war. Then we'll have another look."

One of Colonel Aureliano Buendia's political advisers hastened to intervene.

"It's a contradiction," he said. "If these changes are good, it means that the Conservative regime is good. If we succeed in broadening the popular base of the war with them, as you people say, it means that the regime has a broad popular base. It means, in short, that for almost twenty years we've been fighting against the sentiments of the nation."

He was going to go on, but Colonel Aureliano Buendia stopped him with a signal. "Don't waste your time, doctor," he said. "The important thing is that from now on we'll be fighting only for power." Still smiling, he took the documents the delegates gave him and made ready to sign them.

"Since that's the way it is," he concluded, "we have no objection to accepting."

His men looked at one another in consternation.

"Excuse me, colonel," Colonel Gerineldo Marquez said softly, "but this is a betrayal."

Colonel Aureliano Buendia held the inked pen in the air and discharged the whole weight of his authority on him.

"Surrender your weapons," he ordered.

Colonel Gerineldo Marquez stood up and put his sidearms on the table.

"Report to the barracks," Colonel Aureliano Buendia ordered him. "Put yourself at the disposition of the revolutionary court."

Then he signed, the declaration and gave the sheets of paper to the emissaries, saying to them:

"Here are your papers, gentlemen. I hope you can get some advantage out of them."

Two days later, Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, accused of high treason, was condemned to death. Lying in his hammock, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was insensible to the pleas for clemency. On the eve of the execution, disobeying the orders not to bother him, Ursula visited him in his bedroom. Encased in black, invested with a rare solemnity, she stood during the three minutes of the interview. "I know that you're going to shoot Gerineldo," she said calmly, "and that I can't do anything to stop it. But I give you one warning: as soon as I see his body I swear to you by the bones of my father and mother, by the memory of Jose Arcadio Buendia, I swear to you before God that I will drag you out from wherever you're hiding and kill you with my own two hands." Before leaving the room, without waiting for any reply, she concluded:

"It's the same as if you'd been born with the tail of a pig."

During that interminable night, while Colonel Gerineldo Marquez thought about his dead afternoons in Amaranta's sewing room, Colonel Aureliano Buendia scratched for many hours trying to break the hard shell of his solitude. His only happy moments, since that remote afternoon when his father had taken him to see ice, had taken place in his silver workshop where he passed the time putting little gold fishes together. He had had to start thirty-two wars and had had to violate all of his pacts with death and wallow like a hog in the dungheap of glory in order to discover the privileges of simplicity almost forty years late.

At dawn, worn out by the tormented vigil, he appeared in the cell an hour before the execution. "The farce is over, old friend," he said to Colonel Gerineldo Marquez. "Let's get out of here before the mosquitoes in here execute you." Colonel Gerineldo Marquez could not repress the disdain that was inspired in him by that attitude.

"No, Aureliano," he replied. "I'd rather be dead than see you changed into a bloody tyrant."

"You won't see me," Colonel Aureliano Buendia said. "Put on your shoes and help me get this shitty war over with."

When he said it he did not know that it was easier to start a war than to end one. It took him almost a year of fierce and bloody effort to force the government to propose conditions of peace favorable to the rebels and another year to convince his own partisans of the convenience of accepting them. He went to inconceivable extremes of cruelty to put down the rebellion of his own officers, who resisted and called for victory, and he finally relied on enemy forces to make them submit.

He was never a greater soldier than at that time. The certainty that he was finally fighting for his own liberation and not for abstract ideals, for slogans that politicians could twist left and right according to the circumstances, filled him with an ardent enthusiasm. Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, who fought for defeat with as much conviction and loyalty as he had previously fought for victory, reproached him for his useless temerity. "Don't worry," he would say, smiling. "Dying is much more difficult than one imagines." In his case it was true. The certainty that his day was assigned gave him a mysterious immunity, an immortality for a fixed period that made him invulnerable to the risks of war and in the end permitted him to win a defeat that was much more difficult, much more bloody and costly than victory.

In almost twenty years of war, Colonel Aureliano Buendia had been at his house many times, but the state of urgency with which he always arrived, the military retinue that accompa